Project Management Software

[jheidt2543]

I am looking for a reasonably priced, intuitive software package to manage multiple projects (5-10) as an Owner's representative. The main functions would be to organize and manage contracts, change orders, drawings, drawing changes, submittals, meeting notes, etc. While scheduling might be a good feature, the Contractors involved would actually be developing and monitoring the progress schedules. It would also be a good feature if the package to export and import from other software packages.

Any suggestions or recommendations?

 

[Celt83]

There are a few options I would suggest:

Basecamp is a great central hub to house projects and also has the per project document/communication organization. We have found this to tick most boxes at the right price point. Download speeds are good on documents housed on the service. Can say that after 12 months of use I have never had a need to contact their support, so can't comment on their responsiveness. the document housing acts similar to drop box so can store any file type you would like on their service.

Plangrid is great at housing documents and from a construction perspective has a great mechanism to create and track RFI's. We got priced out of using Plangrid but we are a small firm. There are a lot of great features and the Support Staff is amazing based on personal experience. They seem to be listening to their userbase and implementing things they want. Render speed of documents is the fastest I have encountered as well. Can store any filetype as an attachment, PDFs are the only files that can be parsed into their more advanced document management side.

Bluebeam is a great PDF editor/viewer but their Studio cloud environment certainly gives the above services a run for their money. The Studio portion is actual included as part of the licensing price and as far as I have been able to tell includes unlimited storage on the studio service. You can create live PDF sessions which we have used for internal and external coordination and save a log of all markups for archive purposes. Download times for PDF's can be a little slow on occasion. Their support team is also very responsive in my experience. Studio is essentially a dropbox/google drive cloud storage solution with the added benefit of the the native PDF markup and rendering.

Owncloud this would be your free alternative which thru pre-built and internally created plug-ins could be on par with the above services. As with all free software will take some effort to meet your specific needs but will have the benefit of not being reliant on a 3rd parties file servers.